Irène Mathieu's writing is wrought across generations and epochs, but also in the rhythms of her own life as a black woman in America. Her day job as a practicing pediatrician influences how she feels language and history lodge themselves in the body, and what poetry can or can't do about it. We talked about how she thinks through her place in her own and in her family’s history, and what time itself means in when reckoning with historical patterns of oppression.